MarCom Writer Blog: B2B Blogging Archives

Even with the hole Google has put into its Analytics keywords report (the dreaded “not provided”), the report is still a treasure trove of information — especially when it comes to finding ideas for B2B blog and e-newsletter topics.

Case in point: The best thing about Google is that you can find an answer to almost anything you need to know. Just search for, “How to . . .” and your query, and you can generally find what you need.

To learn the questions your prospective customers are asking, look for these “how to” questions in your Google Analytics keyword report. In my own analytics reports, I’ve seen the following:

“how do I calculate marketing ROI”
“what is the benefit of seo b2b”
“how to use Facebook for B2B”
“how to improve a b2b website”
“how often to post on a b2B blog”
“how print ads generate web leads”
“how to increase facebook campaign reach”

These are all great blog and e-newsletter topics. If your company sells or manufactures a technical product or service, you can set up an “Ask Bill” or “Ask Sue” type of column in your blog or e-newsletter (use one of your engineers or techie people for this column — and use their real names!). Then have this person answer a question on a weekly basis. If this doesn’t work for you, just write posts / articles that answer people’s questions.

To get maximum traction in Google, follow these three easy tips:

Tip #1: Use the search phrase in the Post title

Tip #2: Optimize the post for the search phrase

Tip #3: Write original content using your own expertise

Example: For one of my clients, I wrote a post, “How to Cool Down a Warehouse.” I used the search phrase in the post title and in the SEO Title and description tags. Of course, the post itself contained original content that educated buyers about the topic — and oh yeah, it just so happened the client’s product helped solve the problem of cooling down a warehouse.

Due to these simple and totally white hat SEO tips, that post is still #1 in Google for “how to cool down a warehouse.”

You cannot get high value original content like this by buying it from “automated” services that churn it out by the truckload.

This is one of my favorite strategies for creating blog and e-newsletter content. One, it’s super easy. Two, you’re being helpful and and giving people information. Three, you’re creating targeted content that sends prospects to your door. And four, it’s original content that Google loves. Try it yourself and let me know how it goes.

Since writing my last post about keeping your blog alive — and with the launch of this new site — people have been asking me a lot of questions, some of which include SEO, blogs, and content.

One idea I’ve found myself talking about repeatedly is the strategic use of Categories and Tags on my blog. I’ve been testing how these work with regard to SEO for a couple of years now. Long story short, Google indexes Categories and Tags, so it pays to choose them carefully — and to use them strategically!

You can learn more about Categories and Tags — and their importance — in this post I wrote in July 2011 for Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Newsletter, “Help People Find Your Blog Content with Categories and Tags.”

And, if you want to see another way I’ve used Categories and Tags, mosey on over to my Learning Center landing page and look for “Web Marketing Know-How.” I’ve also included a screen shot below. Those links are my blog Categories. Click on one of them and you get all the content I’ve written for that particular Category.

I set it up this way for a couple of reasons. Because it’s easy to lose content in a blog, I wanted to 1) Make it easy for people to find the content I’ve written over the years; and 2) Showcase my expertise.

I spent weeks cleaning out my blog before I began working on the launch of my new site. I got rid of dozens of dated posts. Most important, I trashed quite a few posts that were driving untargeted traffic. Why? Isn’t any traffic good traffic?

No. Because I focus on getting real results for my clients, it’s not enough for me to say, “I increased traffic to your site.” I want to say, “I helped you get traffic that *converts.*”

I liken this strategy to direct mail. One factor in determining a high response rate is to ensure you have the right list. By writing blog content geared toward prospects / customers who may need your services, you’re targeting the right list.

Hence, I wanted my blog to feature only the information that revolves around B2B Web Marketing in order to drive targeted traffic. I use this same strategy for my clients’ blogs.

What do you think? Leave your ideas below.

I see / read dozens and dozens of blog posts filled with tips on how to have a better blog, how to drive traffic to your blog, blah, blah, blah.

Here is a real simple blogging success tip I don’t see anywhere:

Don’t let your blog die.

Seriously.

Just five minutes ago I came upon a small business B2B site of a company founded by a person who is *the* expert in her field. She’s smart, savvy, and full of really great things to say.

Click over to her blog and alas, the last post written was in 2010. (I won’t even talk about how blog used the generic WP theme and that it reflected poorly on her, her company and her brand.)

I see abandoned blogs all the time. And it’s a shame, because a good B2B blog is a real marketing asset.

I totally get that keeping up a blog takes some work, especially when you’re running a business. Trust me — keeping up this blog can sometimes be challenging.

But, here’s the thing. Blogs — especially B2B blogs — don’t have to require a lot of time. Here are my three easy-peasy tips for keeping your B2B blog alive:

1. Write shorter posts — We’re all bombarded by information today. And we’re mobile. And crazy busy. No one has time to read long posts that make your eyes glaze over. Especially on a smart phone. So save your opus for a white paper and write shorter posts.

2. Let other people have fun — If you have employees, let them write posts. If you don’t have time to manage all this activity, hire someone (like me) to manage it (and even ghostwrite) for you.

3. Ignore the standard advice — Small business owners get overwhelmed when they think they have to post multiple times a week or even multiple times a month. Listen to me: Unless you’re trying to become Mashable or TechCrunch, you DO NOT HAVE TO POST MULTIPLE TIMES A WEEK.

I’d rather a small business post a couple of times a month — consistently — and keep the blog alive then try to be a “publisher” (another piece of standard advice you can ignore) and flame out.

What do you think? Am I right or am I crazy?

I hear lots of reasons why a B2B company should blog:

• Google gives preference to “fresh” content.
• Search engine spiders visit your site more often when you’re frequently updating content.
• Blog content gets into the search engines faster (sometimes an hour after you post it!).
• Blog content provides the fuel for social media, i.e. Tweets, FB, G+ or LinkedIn status updates.
• Blogs allow you to converse with customers, prospects and fans one-to-one.

These are all great reasons to blog. But I have another one.

A blog leads to increased exposure for your business.

In October, just hours after I purchased my iPad, I had to reprogram my thermostat. I walked over to the wall panel with my iPad so that I could get the name of the manufacturer in order to do a search for the manual.

I found the manufacturer’s site easily enough, but when I went to access it, I couldn’t get past the home page. That’s because the site wasn’t iPad friendly. The menus didn’t work nor could I find a sitemap link.

To see if the site had the manual I needed, I had to boot up my laptop.

This article isn’t about what this inability to access content does to your sales process (kills it, basically), so I won’t go there. I think you get the point.

Once I had my thermostat reprogrammed, I quickly dashed off a post about making your B2B site iPad friendly using the site as an example of what not to do, and thought nothing more about it – until B2B Magazine made it their blog post of the week on December 7.

That same week, Jackie Jones, from Response Magazine, called for an interview after finding my blog post. “I read your post,” she said. “You’re obviously an expert on how marketers should be using mobile devices.” Ok, wow, thank you!

Once the article went live, I wrote a blog post about it – and again, just put it out there on a Twitter, LinkedIn and my FB page. Much to my delight, this post has been retweeted 66 70 times as of this writing!

I’m not saying that every single business needs to implement a blog – or that each post you write will garner this type of exposure. But, it’s happened enough – for me and for my clients – to allow me to state with certainty that a blog does have some wonderful PR-related benefits.

Blogging isn’t easy, it does take some time, and you do need to dedicate resources to it – either time, money or both. And no, you can’t simply push out press releases to it, and yes, you do have to create original content for it.

But, blogging does make sense for business-to-business and here’s why:

It shows your expertise – The marketers and small business owners I talk to worry that they’ll need to produce long, thought-provoking pieces. What I’ve learned is that people are hungry for quick tips and information they can use right now.

A blog (and an e-newsletter, too) is the perfect way to add this type of information to your site.

Your expertise gets found – Content marketers talk a lot about content getting “found.” Yes, that does happen. But what also happens is that your expertise gets found, too. Your ideas get linked to, tweeted, and commented on – giving you and your business yet more exposure.

Reporters come to you — I’ve written (ok, ranted) enough about clueless PR people who send out untargeted PR pitches. When you create original blog content that’s geared toward helping your audience — and that’s fairly interesting and well-written — reporters end up calling you. This is actually a much nicer way to do things.

In my own example, I didn’t have to send a press release to anyone touting my expertise. In fact, I don’t send out any releases or email and somehow seem to garner a respectable amount of PR for myself. You can do the same.

If you’re a small B2B business and you have a blog, what’s been your experience with regard to your blog generating press for you?

Last night I met three other bloggers at the Publicity Club of New England’s “Blogger Relations for PR Pros” event.

You can read the Tweet stream to see some of the questions and comments. The questions were really good and everyone was engaged.

It was good for me to get out and meet other bloggers and to hear what PR pros are trying to accomplish. The one thing I learned, that wasn’t brought up at the meeting, is this: When you’re pitching bloggers, you definitely need a strategy.

You need to determine what your news is and which type of blogger you should be pitching. A huge difference exists between a blogger at a news agency or publication and someone like me. The news agency blogger needs content all day long. This person is following Twitter all day looking for trends and breaking news.

Someone like myself, on the other hand, needs a post or two a week — or maybe even less than that. I’m definitely not on Twitter all day because if I were, I’d never get any work done. My blogging objective isn’t to post breaking news.

To be successful at pitching bloggers, you definitely need to take this into account when developing your strategy and your objectives.

The panel, of which I was a part, featured four bloggers: two from actual news agencies, a food blogger who blogs at night after her day job, and myself — a crazy busy marketing consultant who blogs when I can squeeze it in.

All of us love blogging. All of us want to feature great content and great stories.

But all of us have different objectives and focus and needs, which is why it pays to develop a strategy first. This doesn’t have to be time consuming or even difficult. You’ll want to answer the following questions:

• What is the real news and who is our target audience?
• Why is this news important to them and what benefit is it to them to read it?
• What action (if any) do we want them to take once they read our news?
• Who are the bloggers and reporters in our space who might find this news of interest and who either reach or influence our audience? What is the best way to contact them? (This doesn’t have to be a huge list to be effective, by the way.)
• What will constitute success and how will we measure it?

That’s it.

Thank you to the New England Publicity Club (@PubClubofNE) for having me as a guest, and thank you to my fellow panelists, Jason Keith (@jaykeith), Rachel L. Blumenthal (@blumie), and Greg Gomer (@sliggity). This was one of the better events I’ve attended, mostly because I learned a lot, plus I came away with a great deal of respect for bloggers and PR pros alike.

And a special thank you to Jennifer McDowell, my rep at BusinessWire, who rescued me. I left my wallet at home; she graciously loaned me the cash to get out of the parking lot.

Katie Meurin, of Komarketing Associates, an SEO firm, posted a stat that I found interesting in her post, “15 Content Marketing and Social Media Takeaways from the B2B Marketing Summit.”

Of the 79% of B2B marketers using social media, only 28% use a blog.

If you’re a B2B company using social media, including Twitter, FB or LinkedIn, then a blog should definitely be part of your strategy. Why do I say this?

Simply put, a blog is how you easily, quickly and cost-effectively create fresh content on a regular basis. And if you’re using social media anyway, why not use these tools to get people back to your Website via this content?

Unlike an e-newsletter, which has its own specific format and publication schedule (generally once or twice a month), a blog gives you a number of benefits as it allows you to:

1. Respond to news and industry events as they happen — This is especially good if you work in an industry where timely response can position you as a thought leader and/or expert. I had one prospect say, for example, “Yeah, we wish we had a blog because so much has been happening in our space. We need to write about it.” A once-a-month newsletter, while good, doesn’t give you this timeliness.

2. Post customer stories / pictures — If you manufacture products and then install them at customer sites, you can take photos and post these to your blog along with a testimonial. In many cases, these photos and testimonials are much easier to obtain (and cheaper, too), than a case study.

3. Answer customers’ questions — If you’re like many small business owners or marketers, you probably hear the same questions repeatedly. You can write blog posts answering these questions. Or, consider using one of your engineers or product specialists and creating an “Ask Bob,” type of column where Bob answers technical or other types of questions. (Bob doesn’t have to actually write it — you, the marketer, can write it but get the info from him.)

Tip: Go through your Google Analytics keyword report to see what types of “How to” searches you’re getting and create “Ask Bob” posts from those, too.

4. Publicize your reports, case studies, company news, etc. — A blog is a great place to post your new content as people can link to it, retweet it, etc. Also mix in news about your company, including tradeshows you’re attending, new products, and anytime your company is featured in a mainstream or industry publication.

5. Show your personality — The one thing I love about working with small companies is the fact that they have so much personality. Once I get to know the owners and/or marketers, I hear all kinds of neat stories about the company and the owners themselves.

These stories make great blog posts. Why? Because people do business with people they trust. As you post more about the people inside your company, the people who read your blog get to know you. As they get to know you, they build trust in you so that when they’re ready to do business with you, they already feel as if they know you.

So instead of posting pictures of your building (zzzzzzzzz) or sticking with safe but really boring bios of your management team on the “About Us” page, let your hair down a little bit and post what’s happening inside your company. That’s the stuff people like to read — and keeps them coming back for more.

Notice I didn’t say that having a blog helps your content show up in the search engines. Yes, yes, yes, that’s a benefit, but it’s not the main reason you should write one. Writing for search engines means you’re writing for a bot, not people, and bot-driven, keyword dense content is pretty yucky, in my opinion.

What other benefits can a small B2B company derive from having a well-written blog? Leave your comments below.

Edited to add: Just read this great article by Robert Rose in the Chief Content Officer Magazine, “Best Practices . . . mediocre results” about why focusing on ROI can suffocate your “escape from the herd” thinking. He gives a great example of how this type of thinking killed what was going to be a great company blog.

I would definitely attend the Publicity Club of New England’s October 19, 2011 program, “Blogger Relations for PR Pros,” even if I weren’t on the panel. That’s because I’m on the receiving end of a lot of really bad pitches.

I’m really glad that the Publicity Club asked me to be on the panel, however, because I have quite a bit to say about the topic.

I don’t bill myself as a PR pro, but I’ve had to do my fair share of PR for clients. Just two weeks ago, for example, I had to contact editors and reporters of trade publications to invite them to my client’s tradeshow booth (hint: I had better luck with the phone than I did email). So trust me, I know how hard your job is.

If you are a PR pro, and you want to know how to get the attention of a blogger like me, my number one piece of advice is this:

STOP SEEING ME AS A FRICKEN NEWS AGENCY.

Ok, whew. I’m glad I got that off my chest.

Here’s the skinny, PR pros. Spend just a minute or two on my blog and you’ll see that it’s part of my Website. Click around on my site and you’ll see — in about 10 seconds — that I’m a B2B Web marketing consultant. Heck, it even says that in my header of my site.

What does this mean? It means that I make a living as a consultant / copywriter doing billable work for clients.

It means I’m not Reuters, the AP, or Mashable where I post “breaking news” and content all day every day. All you have to do is look at how often I post (like two to three times a month) to know this about me.

Because I’m a consultant, and because I’m great at what I do, I’m crazy busy. And, like most everyone these days, I’m overwhelmed with email. When your untargeted, poorly written email hits my overflowing inbox, I delete it immediately — without reading it — as I can usually tell by the subject line whether or not you’ve even looked at my blog.

If you are a PR pro, perhaps you can tell me why I was sent a pitch concerning Xtract Research, which is a company that deals in research for financial institutions (I think).

Does the company know what the PR pro is doing on its behalf? And, how does this PR person report his / her results of such poorly targeted pitching?

If you’re a PR Pro who wants great results for your clients, I’ve got a few tips for how you can reach a busy blogger like me:

1. Do your homework.

It shouldn’t take you very long to see what I write about: B2B Web marketing, SEO and social media. I don’t post much industry news as lots of other bloggers already do that. So I’m not really interested in news, products or content that doesn’t relate to what I write about.

2. Get to know me.

As you can see by my comment stream, those who read my blog are pretty engaged. I do make a concerted effort to get to know the “regulars” who leave comments. I follow them on Twitter or G+, have added their blogs to my blog roll and as time permits, read their stuff. You can become part of my community by leaving a thoughtful comment or two. I’ll notice this way more than your email pitch.

3. Help me do my job better.

I blog because I love it, not because I’m trying to be an industry publication or to get my content in the search engines for particular keywords. I’m pretty busy — and as you can surmise from my irregular posting schedule, I post when I have the time.

You can help me by emailing me topics or tidbits that I and — this is key — MY READERS might find interesting. Two or three sentences will do. But before you do this, be sure and read points #1 and #2 again.

If you’ve gotten this far reading my rant, thank you for listening. If you’re a PR pro in the Boston area and want to learn how to reach stressed and/or cranky bloggers, be sure to attend the Publicity Club of New England’s program. And if you do read my blog and you’re attending the meeting, be sure to introduce yourself to me. I’d love to meet you.

You can also follow me on Facebook — I’ve started posting “Blogger Relations” tips.

I love having a blog. It’s less formal than an e-newsletter and lets me express a more “authentic” voice. I’m also not bound by a publishing schedule and can post when the mood strikes me.

Building a blog readership, however, is a little more difficult than building an e-newsletter subscriber base. This is because the e-newsletter subscription process is automatic — you hand over your email address and viola, an e-newsletter shows up in your email inbox.

A blog, however, requires the reader to set up the RSS feed in a feed reader (i.e. Bloglines or Google Reader) — and sometimes those feeds don’t work — and then you as the reader have to make the time to go read all those blog posts.

In short, even with a blog reader you still have to go to the blog whereas an e-newsletter comes to you. To get people to your blog you have to work a little harder. I’m using the following tips with my own blog and have seen pretty good results:

1. Write remarkable content — As Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah write in their best-selling book, Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs (full disclosure: I edited this book), you want to write content that others will want to comment on and pass around.

This means you can’t write product pitches or publish press releases or talk about your company or post any of that other corporate dreck that puts people to sleep.

Instead, you have to think of yourself as a journalist and write content that’s interesting, insightful, humorous, and maybe even off the beaten track.

2. Publish regularly — Notice I didn’t say “establish a regular publishing schedule.” The beauty of blogs is that you can post stuff all day long, the way Mashable does, or you can post twice a month. The important thing is to develop content on a regular basis.

3. Include an email subscription option — People do want to be notified of new posts via email, so include this option on your blog (you can easily add it via FeedBurner).

4. Include social media buttons — Make it easy for people to repost your blog content on the various social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and G+, by prominently displaying the various icons or buttons to each platform.

5. Market your content — Once you publish your content, you have to market it by publishing links to it via Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Don’t be afraid to ask a few of your favorite followers or your friends / colleagues to RT (retweet) or repost your content.

You can publicize your content via your e-newsletter, too.

6. Respond to comments — Once you start getting comments, always respond to them. This lets people know you’re reading comments and that you appreciate someone taking the time to leave a comment.

If you use WordPress, consider adding the Discus plugin, which makes it easy to respond to comments on your blog and those blogs that also use the plugin.

7. Leave comments on others’ blogs — If you want people to read your blog and leave comments, then it pays to leave comments on other people’s blogs. I’ve made it a goal to try and read two or three blog posts a day and then leave a comment on at least one of them.

Once you start leaving comments, your fellow bloggers will be so happy they’ll start leaving comments on your blog — as will other readers who find your comments.

Bonus tip: Add a call-to-action — At the end of each blog post, ask people what they think about your post and to leave their comments / ideas / insights.

What strategies have you used to get people to your blog? Post your ideas / tips below — and thank you.

I write a monthly real estate newsletter for my client, ForeclosuresMass.

Each month I have to find real estate experts to interview on topics ranging from property management and rehabbing to marketing and financing.

Of course, the first place I begin my search is with Google. And, many of the top results for my search terms include articles submitted by “experts” to article submission sites.

After clicking through to these articles, however, I’ve learned that many times you can’t contact the people behind the articles. One day I spent close to two hours trying to track down an “expert” whose name was on all kinds of articles (which were actually rather well done).

Alas, I could not find him — not on any real estate Website, Facebook, LinkedIn, or via Google search on his name and town. I realized that his articles were simply a means to get people to his e-commerce site — and even then, you could not contact him. (Which then made me wonder what he was hiding.)

Suffice to say, I now skip over articles when they appear in the search results and have learned how to cherry pick the real experts — those that have real Websites that include contact information.

I bring up this topic because my last blog post, about saving money on translations, has garnered a number of comments. I wondered if the post is appearing for search terms. I checked, and yes, it’s at the top in Google for “saving money on translations” (I’ve seen it at #1 and #2).

The listing directly below it is to an article on the Ezine Articles site.

Those people who promote submitting articles to sites like Ezine Articles state that it helps you get top search engine listings. True enough.

However, a well-written blog and/or Website can get you the same results – with the additional benefit of driving people to content that resides on YOUR site versus content that resides with thousands of other “experts” on another site.

Having the same article appear on dozens of sites dilutes the value of the content as it’s no longer fresh or original. (And, I’ve found, too, that those blogs and ezines that re-use the content often don’t include links back to the author’s site/blog.)

The translation article in question does at least send people to a valid Website.

But don’t you think it would be better if the company included all kinds of optimized, educational content on its own Website or a blog — in the form of articles, reports, surveys, etc. — versus submitting it to article sites?

(I wonder, too, if Google won’t start cracking down on this duplicate content. Currently, you can find a “reprinted” article listed 3 – 5 times in the top 20 search results for a given search phrase. Is this duplication really helping people find the best information?)

HubSpot Marketing posted five excellent blogging resolutions — from which I’m heavily borrowing (with their permission)!

Herewith, my blogging resolutions for 2009 (which is going to be an excellent year!):

1. Post more regularly — I make resolutions all year long to post more regularly. Some weeks I post two or three times. But other times, when I get really busy and overwhelmed, I don’t post at all. My first resolution is to add my blog to my daily work schedule and then post at least two times a week every week.

2. Link to other bloggers — I read a ton of blog posts, newsletters, and reports. I even print out this information and plaster sticky notes on it to remind me to write blog posts. But alas, by the time I get around to writing, the blog post, newsletter or report is months old. I resolve to do a better job of linking to other bloggers by writing about their interesting or insightful information within a week of it being posted online.

3. Learn how to better optimize this blog — I downloaded and activated the WordPress SEO plugin, but I never use it. I resolve to learn how to optimize this blog and then report my findings.

4. Link to my other content — I publish an e-newsletter each month, write articles for other online publications, and often get interviewed by other bloggers, but I don’t always publish links to this content. I resolve to do a better job of promoting other bloggers and online venues and their efforts to reach out to me.

5. Use more pictures — I heartily agree with those experts who say blog posts should have pictures. I do try to include them when possible, but will often forego adding pictures when pressed for time. I resolve to make my blog posts more graphically appealing by adding pictures, logos, YouTube videos, etc. whenever possible.

That is my list. What do you think I should do more of? What should I do less of?